I've been reading about PIE and i'm confused. As I understand, it is assumed to be the language spoken by Europeans 6,000 years ago. No written record of the language has ever been found so the language has been reconstructed through seemingly arbitrary means. So, In all likeliness actual PIE sounded very different. What makes this language (as it exists today) useful? This is essentially a conlang that is too complicated to learn. What am I missing? Sorry if I'm coming off as negative. I find PIE both confusing and fascinating.

PIE is less of an language in the modern sense and more of an explanation aa to why so many languages have similar sounds. Why are "ma" and "pa" sounds used for mom and dad in so many unrelated languages? There has to be a common ancestor. This Wikipedia article has a list of a bunch of PIE words and their cognates

Well said.

It's more of a "there must have been a commonality at some point that's the root of all these languages that have so many shared sounds"

Keep in mind the "Proto" part - meaning "earliest" or "parent" - that which came first.

Since there's no written form, not a single word, we have no way to know it first hand. There's no Rosetta stone of PIE.

What we do know is the commonality of words in so many different languages points to a common origin.

Sort of like the Big Bang - if you wind the clock backwards, to what do all these common words in all these different languages point?

Or like Dark Matter - matter we can't see but assume must be there because of the behaviour of planets and stars indicates another mass is influencing them.

Or like tracing human history through genetics - its a big funnel pointing to the origin.

I wouldn't read anything more into it than that.

Edit: The Great Courses has a course from John McWhorter (professor at Columbia) called Language Families of the World - there's a lecture specifically on PIE, and he routinely references connections to it throughout the course. (He also discusses other major families like Dravidian).

Edit2: Not just European languages - Asian languages such as all languages of Iran and most languages of India are Indo-European.

I think the big problem is that you seem to believe that the reconstruction of PIE is done according to whim: The reconstruction of proto-languages like PIE is done using what's called the "comparative method" (that's your magic word to look into) and is continually refined based on new evidence, taking into account the age of the evidence (i.e. Gothic, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Hittite, and Latin texts would be closer to PIE than modern languages) and the observed trends of how languages have tended to change over time since the invention of writing. So the reconstruction of PIE is very scientific in fact, and the reconstruction of laryngeals in PIE in like 1879 actually correctly predicted the location of ḫ in the descendant Hittite language, loooong before that language was deciphered in the 1920s. So if PIE is bogus we wouldn't expect it to have any sort of predictive value, but it clearly does!

As for the use of PIE, or proto-languages in general… Well, they can help chart out human migration, they can tell us about the development and spread of technologies and ideas, they can tell us about what ancient societies were like, they can help us decipher undeciphered descendant languages, and things like that. And for learners of modern languages, historical linguistics like proto-language reconstruction can help explain why certain grammatical features in a language work the way they do. For instance, I've noticed that Russian verbs often end in strikingly similar ways to Latin ones, because they share a common ancestor.

A final thing: PIE was not spoken by "Europeans" 6,000 years ago. PIE was spoken by an unknown culture — the leading theory is the Yamnaya culture in what is now Ukraine and Russia — and then spread out across Europe and much of Asia in a series of migrations. Following these migrations, the communities of PIE speakers grew isolated from one another and had their common language gradually diverge into many different languages, which gradually diverged into new languages in turn. A notable thing is that when the Proto-Indo-Europeans migrated westward into the bulk of Europe, there were in fact already people there who spoke their own completely unrelated languages. Only one of those "paleo-European" languages has a surviving descendant today, that is Basque.

Excellent!

I'd hoped McWhorter's course (Language Families of the World) would've gone into this kind of detail, but its more of a 100-level course exposing students to the concepts and scale of language families.

Yea, it's a great introduction. I have his History of the Alphabet course, too.

Would've enjoyed having him as a prof!

The History of English podcast is really interesting too. Probably nothing you don't already know, but good to pass on to people asking questions.

In this line of common origins, a more modern example that comes to mind are Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The 3 still preserve similarities, such as kanji and hanja, phonetics of words, and some structures. And having a better documented history of how migration and colonization went over there, it helps better explaining the similarities.

I don't like the theory that it must have spread from a single culture, it could've been multiple cultures influencing each other. Then you don't get a single definitive version of PIE, but different dialects. And if these cultures spread out and mixed with whatever other cultures that were present in Europe or India you get yet again some new language variants that slowly turned into the languages that we have records for, instead of developing into these languages due to isolation. That's just my pet theory.

Sorry for the late response. I read your post and some Wikipedia articles and also watched some YouTube videos and I now have a basic understanding of the comparative method. My question seems misinformed looking back. Side note, this topic also got my to read about Proto-Human language which Wikipedia says is widely rejected so that was an interesting detour. It's fun to learn. I'll check out the linguistics community. Thank you!